Our antihero is Nicholas Hoult's Stelfox, an A&R man for a middling record label at the time of the Britpop craze. He's keen to move up the ranks of his company but unencumbered by any obvious talent for his job beyond the ability to ingest enormous quantities of drugs. A snap of temper one night leads to murder and seems to open his way to move forward, but his life only becomes more difficult from there. Between an odious dance producer, a vulgar girl group, a hot Swedish indie band and a host of rivals, Stelfox is still beset by problems.

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Hoult does his best, but rarely has an actor been less well supported by his script and director. The endless narration to camera is seldom funny but neither does it give us much insight into Stelfox's character. It's just adolescent cynicism posing as some insight into human nature or the music business, and is not terribly illuminating on either count. Does anyone these days have a rosy view of the big music labels that needs to be punctured? Is anyone really under the impression that they act selflessly to support artists? So what are we really learning?

What's worse, this is meant to be a period piece set at the height of Britpop, but aside from the videos playing on TV and one guy in a ringer tee you'd never know it. This is so set upon looking cool that it forgets to look Nineties. Without a real sense of time and place, you just feel like it's weirdly out of touch and wonder why everyone is using flip phones; it's like Adele's "Hello" video with a worse soundtrack.

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It might almost have been better to update it to the present day, and find some fresh crises in the digital era, than make a faithful adaptation with this watered-down vision of the decade.

And here's the thing about American Psycho, for any who remain unconvinced. That book is supposed to be equally (or more) convincing as the fantasy of a sad little man who only dreams of murder. The fact that people keep seeing Patrick Bateman's victims alive is not a delusion; it's the whole point. This story, however, attempts to have that cake and eat it. Stelfox has his daydreams of acting outrageously and publicly, particularly in one restaurant scene with a band he is trying to sign, but he also

actually indulges in crazy violence. So this is both reality and fantasy, with no coherent dividing line between the two and no way to read it on multiple levels.

For a moment, late on, the film threatens to develop a conscience and you wonder if a small nod to Crime &Punishment will emerge from all the coke-snorting and exstacy-downing. But it almost immediately returns to its rotten business as usual. This hero lacks the emotional heft of a Raskolnikov, and in the end doesn't even share much with Patrick Bateman beyond his terrible taste in music.